Jamie Haggard, Green Sun Medical - Technology-Enabled Spinal Brace | LSI Europe '22

Transcription

Jamie Haggard  0:03  

Hello, my name is Jaime Haggard. I'm the CEO of Green Sun Medical and I would like to introduce you to my world. There's my friend Sammy. She was a promising young junior Olympic swimmer. When one day she brought home a note from the school nurse telling her mom that Sammy likely had scoliosis and she needed to seek treatment for her curved and twisted spine. Sammy was one of the 3% of adolescents whose curves progressed past 10 degrees and get a diagnosis of scoliosis. In the US over 100,000 of these adolescents have curves the progress to the point of needing treatment, Sammy was prescribed a rigid plastic brace. And if you can imagine trying to talk your 12 year old daughter and awareness rigid plastic brace 18 hours a day during the most impressionable time in their life, it didn't work so well. Despite her best efforts. Her current progress to the point that she needed a 10 level spinal fusion. scoliosis surgery for adolescents is second only to appendicitis. In the US hospital system for charges over 18,000 of these kids receive surgery. Bracing today was developed over 50 years ago, and it hasn't changed that much. They're offered a rigid plastic brace. There's been some inventions with 3d printing, and custom braces, but they're all still rigid plastic braces. The kids can't move freely. They can't do anything with eating and breathing. They can't breathe normally, they get caught at school when we interviewed these patients and their families, the little girls were telling us they can't even bend over and pick up a pencil or tie their shoes. After doing these interviews, we decided that we needed to create a better biomechanical device as well as a better patient experience. If Sammy had needed to correct her teeth, she could have received progressive Invisalign trays. If she'd been born with club feet, she could have worn progressive casts in order to correct the deformity. What kids like Sammy need is a is a dynamic ring system that applies continuous corrective pressure and allows them to move freely. We take a 3d structure model of the patient and custom fabricate a brace for each patient based on standard modular parts. Well, we are now offering patients today like Sammy is a comfortable brace and improve their quality of life because they can eat and breathe normally, they can move freely, they're no longer worried about overheating on hot days. The modularity of the brace allows for easy adjustments when they come in for a visit just like you would with an orthodontics. The brace also provides continuous corrective pressure. And we've started to see spinal curve correction in many of our patients. And these kids say simple things like I kind of forget I'm wearing it. We started with the patient experience and move backwards to the technology. All of our patients have they've been in previous bracing, do that sort of whisper wiggle that we look forward to every time. I learned early on in this journey, no matter how great a product you build. If you can't measure it, it didn't happen. So we added a Compliance Monitor that ties to the patient's phones. So they could see how many hours a day they were wearing the brace that also reported to their parents and the physicians. If you have children, you know they do better if they're getting a report card. What we've learned along the way was that these kids wanted to be empowered in their own treatment, and they were the ones watching their phone the most and seeing that they hit the amount of hours they need to receive the proper treatment. We didn't want to stop there. Through we were very fortunate to receive two national science foundation grants. And we've integrated a force sensor into the brace. It ties in with the patient's phone and also uploads to the physician dashboard so that these physicians in real time can ensure that their patients are receiving the proper treatment. If you look at a Tesla every mile that's being driven, the audit the autopilot records the environment. The data is analyzed later to improve that autopilot. With our brace the Whisperer is going to analyze every single moment it will be collected, it will be analyzed through machine learning to improve our device and essentially we're going to have the autopilot for scoliosis treatment. When someone like Sammy needs to get a brace they usually started a pediatrician and ended up with a surgeon who writes a prescription for a brace. They're then sent to either employees at A hospital or an Outside Clinic in order to have the brace fitted on them. We've been very fortunate to start to partner with hanger which has 900 clinics throughout the US so we have a pathway to the entire country. While we are mainly selling to physicians, the Whisper brace is one of the few devices that you can market directly to the consumer. These patients and especially their parents are really afraid of surgery. And they are looking for a bracing treatment that wasn't developed at a time when everybody had rotary phones. We have distributors and six countries or six states right now. They are bracing they already sell bracing or they sell orthopedic implants. Yet they've approached us because they want to provide the Whisper brace to their customers. Since we launched this summer, every single whisper brace has been covered by insurance using a code for a custom orthosis for spine. There's also now new remote therapeutic monitoring codes, if you're providing a musculoskeletal therapeutic treatment. In our biomechanical study, we have seen that the Whisper brace provides comparable pressure to a Boston brace. But it is strongly preferred because of the quality of life improvements that we can provide to these kids. We have a foundational patent issued in the US and key geographies around the world. We have broad coverage with over 20 claims. We filed an additional patent on the modularity and we have additional IP being Follet filed this year. When we're done helping kids with scoliosis, we're going to move on to the adult market. There's over 1 million patients a year who seek a physician's treatment for scoliosis pain. 42,000 of them end up receiving a massive spinal fusion. The whisperer brace is going to help eliminate many of those surgeries. We're very fortunate to have our team we have decades of experience in orthopedic sales and biomechanical engineering. We have the former VP of global marketing at Stryker, the CFO of Paragon 28, and the former head, US head of Gambro holdings helping guide the country company. We also are very fortunate to receive regular guidance from the founder of Danek, the CEO Resmed and the former CEO of Termo BCT. The world's thought leaders in scoliosis surgery share our vision. They have been designed team leaders for spinal implants at Medtronic, Stryker and j&j. Yet, they've joined us to help keep kids like Sammy from needing surgery. The current market with adult bracing is almost $2 billion. We've already created market demand for the adolescent brace. And with our website, most of our inbound calls are actually from adults who need the treatment. Also, we have high gross margins, we can keep our net profit above 20%. We will also have additional SaaS revenue from our sensor platform. We raised in previous rounds 7.5 million in equity, and we've had $2 million in awards and grants. We're now raising $12 million to support the demand for this brace, and it's going to be preferred stock. We're going to be using the funds to expand commercialization at select children's hospitals throughout the country. We're going to optimize the design based on feedback that we get from our force sensor system. We're gonna we have executives and sales and clinical ready to join our team and help support our distribution channel. We also are going to make further enhancements to the sensor intelligence platform. Additionally, we're going to increase our inventory production and eventually port the process to a contract manufacturer. Along the way, we've won a few awards and including the ABA Med, med tech innovator grand prize. And so if you can imagine a world where Sammy and adults was suffering from scoliosis, encounter transformative innovation, this innovation is not only going to dramatically increase the quality of their life, it's going to drastically reduce the cost of the health care system throughout their lifetime. Thank you.